A Lever for the Mind

A Lever for the Mind

Humans are the cleverest animals in the known universe. But our brains, forged over millions of years in the unforgiving furnace of natural selection, are still primitive. They evolved to be good at hunting animals, making tools, recognising facial expressions and maintaining social bonds, but they’re just not very good at working with several difficult ideas simultaneously, and they’re particularly bad at reasoning about the counterintuitive emergent behaviour of complex non-human systems.

Abstraction is our solution to this problem. Abstraction works as an adapter between the fearsome complexity of the universe and our simple primate minds; when the real world is too detailed, too confusing or too counterintuitive for us to work with directly, abstraction gives us big friendly levers to pull on instead. This one powerful idea underlies computers, design, culture, language, and everything else we rely on in our daily work.

This is a talk about abstraction: where it comes from, what it’s for, and how we can use it to make our programs better.